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“I’ll eat in a minute.”

“You said that an hour ago.”

“I’m in the middle of a call.”

“The call ended. That was Ty. Ty’s done.”

I looked up. His face was the face without the grin — the open one, the one that cost him — and his eyes were on the plate and then on me and then on the clipboard and then on the plate again, and the circuit his eyes made between the three objects was the circuit of a man trying to figure out which one he could move.

He reached for the clipboard.

I pulled it toward me. Not fast — the motion was small, the clipboard sliding two inches across the table, my left hand flat on the page. But the pull was clear and the pull was the answer and the answer was no.

His hand stopped. Hovered over the table for a second. Then withdrew.

“Okay,” he said.

He sat down across from me. He didn’t eat either. He sat with his hands on the table and his eyes on me and the plate between us, and the cornbread cooled and the rice cooled and the beans developed a skin, and I worked through the contingency list and the phone stayed on the table and the laptop stayed open and the evening came through the window in long amber planes that moved across the floor and up the wall and disappeared.

At nine, Cash said it.

“Nine o’clock.”

“I know what time it is,” I said.

“The phone—”

“I need to update the run of show and send it to Wyatt tonight. He’s reviewing the budget in the morning.”

“Wyatt can review it at eight.”

“Wyatt can review it at eight if I send it tonight.”

He was quiet. The nine o’clock rule sat between us on the table beside the cold plate and the clipboard and the phone and the laptop, and the rule was a thing we’d built together on a morning when I’d slept ten hours and the world had been a different shape, and the rule was a thing I was breaking, and the breaking was not a mistake. The breaking was the point.

***

The lamp was low.

Cash was in the chair across from me. He’d been there for hours — not continuously, but in the way he’d been there all day, passing through, sitting down, standing up, the orbit of a man who kept returning to the same point in a room because the point was where she was and he hadn’t figured out yet that she wasn’t there. Not the her he was looking for. The her he was looking for was the one who drew cows and giggled at bean plates and said a word that made his whole face change. That woman was behind the clipboard and the contingency list and the four crossed-off names and the professional voice and the plate she hadn’t touched and the nine o’clock she’d worked through, and I knew where she was because I’d put her there.

“Priya.”

I looked up. His voice was low. The lamp caught the green of his eyes and the line of his jaw and the place where the grin lived when the grin was on duty, which it wasn’t. It hadn’t been on duty since the arena, since the bull, since the chute and the word “yeah” and the sound a nineteen-year-old made when his collarbone hit packed clay.

“What do you need?” he asked.

The question was simple. Three words. The same three words he’d been asking all day, all week, since the night he’d held the rope and I’d told him about Denver and he’d said “I can’t fix it” and I’d said “I know, that’s why it worked.” The question had been different then. The question had been an offering — here is the space, here are the hands, here is the man who will hold what you can’t hold. The question now was the same words in a different room, and the room was the one I’d built today with the phone calls and the crossed-off names and the article in the Courier and the coffee I’d finished because leaving it would have been a statement.

“I’ve got it,” I said.

The words came out automatic. The involuntary noise. The thing I said when I didn’t, the phrase that lived in my mouth like a tenant who’d stopped paying rent and couldn’t be evicted because the landlord had given up trying.

He didn’t flinch. He didn’t smile. He sat in the chair with his hands on the table and his eyes on mine and he held the look the way he held everything — steadily, without force, with the patience of a man who gentled two-year-old horses and understood that some things came to you and some things didn’t and the difference was not something you could control.

“We’re a team,” he said.

The word “team” landed on the table between the clipboard and the phone and the dark screen and the cold plate. It sat there. I looked at it. We were a team. We’d been a team since June, since the first panel, since the first permit application, since the morning he’d made eggs and I’d stood at the counter with my phone and he’d said “sit down” and I hadn’t and he’d let me not sit and then he’d let me sit and then he’d let me fall asleep on a floor and draw cows and say a word and fall apart in a bed and tell him about Denver.